As we continue to expand our offerings in other languages, we find that the basic "Arial, Helvetica, Sans-serif" fonts don't display well in other languages. Default sizes may be too large or too small, glyphs may display poorly (jagged edges), and so on.

When a new language becomes available (or when its offerings expand) on LDS.org, we try to find the best fonts to use for that language. Unfortunately, it's not always easy to find information about the best web fonts for each language.

We usually explore existing sites in that language to see what fonts are used. However, often what we find is inconsistent. It's not clear if the fonts they use are standard best practices (like Arial, Helvetica or Verdana), poor but commonly followed practices (like Comic Sans), or custom embedded fonts. We also don't know what the font looks like to a native speaker. For example, sometimes it's not clear whether the font is serif or sans serif (or if those even exist in the language).

We would like to have contact with web developers who are native (meaning, developers who actually work in a given language) and can recommend a list of fonts for that language.

We have a lot of Asian languages coming up right now, so that is our immediate need, but any language (that isn't a Roman language) would be helpful.

If you can be of assistance in this area, or know someone who can, please let us know by adding your comments on this LDSTech Forum thread.

We may not use your services immediately. But it would be great to have resources to go to if and when we do need them.

Comments

Times New Roman can often be one of the cleanest fonts for foreign characters, and is gaining tons of Unicode support as new versions come out. It displays Arabic nicely, though the font is small. You can use CSS to fix the font size though. I've used it for Greek and Hebrew as well. I'm sure many other languages will look good in it. I'm native English speaking though, so I'm just adding my 2 cents.

It is interest of these fonts how help you become even better in reading documents. Most web developments come across everyday. I develop my web in three different languages, Thai, English and French. Specially Thai fonts we spent lesser time on new development. Other fonts such Chinese with today market, we can develop in better web development. In CS4 we also work with the servers. It will help your jobs better and lesser time.

I am from Estonia. The best web font available is Helvetica or Arial. The previosuly mentioned Times New Roman is not a real web font as it is only on Windows computers. If You want Your webpage to look great in all Operating systems, then it's the two mentioned above or even Trebuchet/Tahoma/Verdana.

Actually, you can code in CSS to have alternative fonts if necessary. If Times New Roman gives the best experience, you can set Windows computers to display it while other computers display something different. Also, I believe you can get the rights and code it so it displays the font whether the computer user has it or not, but I'm not sure if that works cross-platform and cross-browser. I've never done it myself.

Yes, You can do it with CSS3.Althought only newer browsers support it and there might be rendering problems on different platforms. Even on browsers. Chrome renders fonts differently from Firefox for example.